Avatar Limited Hands Down Most Bomb Heavy Format of 2025

Timothy Zaccagnino November 26, 2025 MTG News

Last updated on November 26, 2025

Wan Shi Tong, Librarian | Illustration by Andrea Piparo

Avatar: The Last Airbender is in contention for best Limited set of 2025, but it's not without its faults. The design team nailed the flavor of the source material and created some excellent mechanics, but the delta between cards at different rarities is out of control.

Limited enthusiasts often like to put Limited sets into “Prince” or “Pauper” buckets, which is a fancy way of saying any given set is dominated by its rares (prince) or largely defined by its commons/uncommons (pauper). Avatar is so princely it might as well have two crowns, with a massive delta between the many, many busted rares and mythics versus a pretty tame suite of commons.

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Bombs Away!

Avatar Yangchen | Illustration by Kuno

Avatar: The Last Airbender has a lot going for it, with interesting mechanics, heavy support for its themes (lessons and allies in particular), and fun build-arounds worth pursuing. It's also a set where a single rare can end the game on its own, and the removal, while plentiful, isn't always a good out to many of the best rares in the set.

For reference, our Draft/Sealed specialist Bryan Hohns rated 16 of the rares/mythics as true bombs before actually playing with the set. That was first impressions, and it'd be interesting to see where he lands on those cards now, but that's a huge grip of game-winning rares you could open, and that's not even accounting for the rares he simply labeled as “good” or “great”, just a step below bomb status.

Similarly, Andrew Quinn, author of our Avatar Limited Review, gave a 10/10 to eight cards in the set (nine if you include Koma, Cosmos Serpent on the bonus sheet), and another three main-set cards at 9/10.

Other Limited reviewers also had comments on the bomby nature of the set, with Limited podcasts like Limited Level-Ups, Lords of Limited, and Limited Resources all remarking on the power level of the rares during their individual set reviews/crash courses.

FWIW

Totally anecdotal, but as an avid Limited player myself, I'd like to offer my take on the strongest cards in the set. These are all the cards I'd label as “bombs” in Avatar Limited:

And to follow that up, here's everything I'd label as a merely “strong rare”, which will still be responsible for winning a number of games without completely dominating:

South Pole Voyager
Ty Lee, Chi Blocker
The Fire Nation Drill
Phoenix Fleet Airship (haven't seen this yet, so this is just a suspicion)
Raven Eagle
Wartime Protestors
Earthbender Ascension
Great Divide Guide
Beifong's Bounty Hunters
Fire Lord Azula
Iroh, Grand Lotus
Toph, the First Metalbender
Planetarium of Wan Shi Tong

This isn't accounting for the bonus sheet, which ultimately barely matters, and is based solely on my experience in the format, so take everything with a grain of salt. But holy smokes that's a lot of incredible rares. Not to say most sets don't have awesome rares and mythics, but when you compare them to a cast of pretty weak commons, many games of Avatar revolve around resolving one (or multiples) of these cards. Thank heavens for It'll Quench Ya!

Don't Take My Word For It

Water Tribe Rallier | Illustration by Boell Oyino

I'm going to do something I normally don't do, and open up 17lands to consult “The Data”. I don't particularly care for tracking data for Limited, but my personal feelings aside, it's a great tool for getting a snapshot of the best-performing cards in a set.

Avatar stats currently have seven cards performing at a 65% win rate or better (which indicates a very, very strong card). Those are all represented in my lists above. There are another 29 cards sitting between 60-65%, which starts to include some of the best uncommons in the set. Here are all the cards with a 60%+ winrate that I didn't list above:

That's a lot of high win-percentage cards, including some of the upper-tier uncommons like Invasion Submersible and Water Tribe Rallier.

It's worth noting that many of the best cards can be answered. There's no garbage hexproof threats like Dream Trawler and Kiora Bests the Sea God here. However, actually answering many of these threats still puts you in a losing position. Cards like Wan Shi Tong, Librarian, The Earth King, Koh, the Face Stealer, and all of the mythic rare sagas put you up on resources. While a single Sold Out might tag them, you're still up in the exchange. And if you can't removal-check them, many of these run away with the game.

What About the Rest of 2025?

Elspeth, Storm Slayer | Illustration by Ekaterina Burmak

So Avatar‘s bomby, sure, but is it hyperbolic to say it's the most bomb-heavy set of the year?

The closest comparison is Tarkir: Dragonstorm, which was a powerhouse set in its own right. It was swimming with absurd rares like Ugin, Eye of the Storms, Elspeth, Storm Slayer, Jeskai Revelation, and Roar of Endless Song, to name a few. The thing is, RW aggro was also an incredibly important part of the puzzle for that format, and you could craft aggro decks designed to prey on late-game bombs. Avatar has aggro decks, for sure, and can pull off fast starts with Fire Nation Cadets and White Lotus Reinforcements, but the rares tend to table-flip the format as soon as they hit the board, and many of them are cheaper than the 7- and 8-mana bombs from TDM.

Edge of Eternities comes to mind as well, though the set only had four true mega-bombs: Ouroboroid, Quantum Riddler, Cosmogrand Zenith, and Elegy Acolyte.

For comparion, Final Fantasy only had one card exceed 65% win rate, and it was the bonus sheet Atraxa, Grand Unifier.

Aetherdrift had three, including Sab-Sunen, Luxa Embodied and Lumbering Worldwagon, plus the Special Guests version of Skysovereign, Consul Flagship. And depending on who you ask, there was no sixth Limited set this year worth mentioning, and we all know the Arena Powered Cube doesn't count.

All this said, Avatar just wrapped up week one, so there's plenty of time for numbers to settle and people to work out winning strategies against bomby cards. But people are definitely feeling the rarity disparity, especially given how below-the-bar the commons seem to be. Ultimately, it doesn't matter much, since the set is still sweet and offers great gameplay. You just need to fade the double United Front deck a few times (yes, I've seen this happen twice now).

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Timothy Zaccagnino

Timothy has been a Magic enthusiast since picking up the game in 2012, with a love of Limited and Commander. He's the co-creator of Jank Diver Gaming and host of The Jank Tank podcast. These days you can find him at the draft table, brewing his 20th EDH deck or cubing with friends on Arena.